The Harvest is Slowy Starting

Today, my dear sweet Michael cleaned out the chicken coop. We do the deep bedding method, so it only gets cleaned out a couple of times a year. We do add shavings to it throughout the year which helps to keep the smell away and also helps the underneath stuff start to compost. I have been wanting an herb garden. He and Joshua had put together the frame of a raised bed a couple of weeks ago, but we had not filled it in yet. The bottom was lined heavily with newspaper and then we filled it about 1/3 of the way with part of what came out of the coop. Even though it is very humid and in the upper 80's he went up by the big barn and brought down many wheelbarrow loads of composted manure. We filled the rest of the bed with that and with some dirt. My herbs now have a home!!! I am painting a rock to go in the herb garden and working on my plant markers. When I get it all done, I will take pictures to show you. The plants are all in and I mulched it with grass clippings.

While Michael-My-Love was cleaning out the coop, I was out harvesting a few things from the garden. My first cheater tomato (very ugly by the way) was ripe, so it was plucked from the vine. I also got some lettuce and a couple of green onions. I added farm fresh hard boiled eggs and we ate a lunch that was raised or grown by us. I love meals like that.

Here is my ugly mater. I had to cut quite a bit off, but we each got a big bite. It was delicious!!!

Here are my little banty chicks. They are still tiny. =) The two with the dark stripes are Partridge Silkies and the other two are just guesses, although they are both Silkies.

We got our garlic all harvested and hung up to dry. Here is part of it. I planted 2 pounds and got around a hundred beautiful garlic bulbs. This is the Korean Red Garlic. I also planted German White. These are both stiff neck varieties.

The red garlic had really strange scapes. I pulled most of them. They grew right in the stem. Even though they had these scapes on some of them, they were still HUGE!!!

Here's a comparison with my hand to show you how big they are.

We have lots of grapes if the critters don't get them. They won't be ripe for awhile. These are Concord Grapes.

If you click and make this picture bigger, you can see the grapes under the leaves.

I found one lone apple on our tree. These are very young trees, but hopefully one year soon (if we are still here) we will get some good apples.

I need to get back outside. I came in to cool down a bit.